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"How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations." Isaiah 14:12
You had never really been one for religion. You’d been raised as someone torn between two worlds and cast into yet another, adrift, lost. And yet you’d found yourself, decided who you were, despite derision and doubt on every side. Only he had never doubted you. Only he had seen you for who you really were: just a person, just another human shat out into this cold world, seeking both something and nothing. You had heard stories of gods, and spirits and every demon and deity and reckoning and none of them made much sense to you.
There was only the world and how men chose to live in it.
But when you saw his body lying there, lifeless, you thought perhaps you finally understood at least one of the stories you had heard, the old Christian creation story, rammed down your throat so fiercely and so frequently by those who thought they knew best for you. Your father had read it to you as a pastime, the sort of thing you did if you were a parent and wanted to raise your child “right.” Missionaries had repeated it, endlessly, a dull monotony of noncreative thought.
But now…now you understood it. The Creation story. It was not a story of love, and life. It was, perhaps, the greatest tragedy that had ever been written. For God Himself to lose a friend, His most admired, His “Morningstar,” to be rejected by him outright. To choose to cast him out instead of seeking reconciliation. To have pushed him away, and be forced to go on, to desperately try to recreate the love He once felt, to force Himself on creatures too blind and too stupid to understand that free will is just a rope long enough to hang oneself with. It almost made you pity such a deity.
Yes, the Creation story was quite possibly the greatest tragedy of them all, because no amount of force or willpower can ever restore the son that was lost, and no number of pedantic followers will ever make up for the fact that at the last he was failed and has fallen, irredeemable, lost.
You cupped your hand around the cold, dead cheek, wondering if God Himself were looking down at this fallen angel, this might among weakness, brought to ruin by deceit and turmoil. You wondered if somewhere Dutch realized that nothing he ever did would bring his Morningstar back, his brightest son…
Arthur Morgan lay, dead, empty, a husk of former self. Gathering what will you had, you lifted him in your arms, his bulk heavy within your embrace. His head lolled dully on your shoulder and despite your bitter nonbelief in anything but what you could see, you found yourself surprised that seraphim wings were not dangling haphazardly from between his shoulders. His eyes, so blue they seemed almost surreal, were slightly open, his final act – closing them against the brightness of the rising sun – incomplete, like so much of the rest of his life, cut short, no apology offered by Dutch or God or anyone who may have cared about the man’s meager, temporary existence. And yet you knew that he would always exist for you, always a shadow at the corner of your eye, always a bitter taste at the back of your throat.
The devil himself and an angel in one, Arthur Morgan would haunt you for the rest of your days.
“In the beginning,” you remembered, Genesis read aloud to you so many years ago, “God created the heavens and the earth.”
You watched the sun and its movement through the sky, carrying the heavy body to a place on the mountainside that had deep enough soil to dig, that faced the West as you had once heard Arthur request. As you worked, the sun began to rise, painting the mountain in pinks, and oranges and yellows. Sweat dripped down your nose and onto the softened dirt where you dug.
“And God said ‘let there be light.”
Clouds gathered above you, scattering the light of the sun in a million directions, casting Arthur’s face in odd shadows, the stark lines of his cheekbones and chin in sharp contrast to the rounding of his chest and the broadness of his arms.
Birds, calling distantly, flew above you, their lonesome cries a terrible sound in the stillness of your grief.
You knew from the story, that land, sea, sky and every bird of the air and creature of the ground was made over the course of a week, shaped by the hand of God Himself if one believed that sort of thing.
Man, made in His image, appeared the sixth day.
You moved the body into the space you had made, burying it with dirt and rocks, covering last Arthur’s face so that you could gaze upon it one last time, so that you could commit it to memory, fists clenched and heart aching, fury raging at Dutch and every wrong that had been done to this man, this glorious Morningstar who dared to question his god.
You finished covering the body and began in bits and spurts to carve out a gravestone, pulling again from the Bible, knowing it had been the closest belief system Arthur had ever bothered with, raised as he was by men who had their roots in Catholic and Protestant countries:
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” cut angrily into wood, the words blurring even as you carved them. “Arthur Morgan.”
You pounded the cross into the ground, stepping back to survey your work through a mist of tears, fists clenched so hard you thought your palms would bleed from the bites of your nails into the skin.
You sat at the grave, pondering all that had happened, wondering what to do now, wondering if Dutch knew the depths of his sin or if he were off somewhere enjoying the spoils granted to him by his brightest angel's death. Jaw working, you stared out over the heavens and the earth, that last sentence of the creation story you’d been told so long ago now a death knell, the final line of the greatest tragedy that had ever been written, a mockery in the face of this loss:
“And on the seventh day, He rested.”